four months doing the rational thing, which is to say the criminal thing.
Third: she had been systematically moving money out of the trust’s operating account. Not in large dramatic withdrawals that would trigger automatic alerts, but in careful, patient increments. Five thousand here. Eight thousand there. Forty-seven individual transfers over eleven months, each one sized to stay below the thresholds she understood from watching my father’s finances for nearly two decades. By the time he died, she had moved just over three hundred and ten thousand dollars into accounts I could not immediately see.
Most people, when they discover something like this, react. That is the entirely human and entirely understandable response. You scream. You call a lawyer. You post about it and contact every family member in your phone. You let your outrage speak because your outrage is legitimate and you are in genuine pain and you want the people around you to understand what has been done.
Diane was counting on that.
She hadn’t just stolen money. She had a second phase to the operation, because a theft this size required a seco
